This past May, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico, and headed west to the town of Ruidoso to pick up a patient. It shouldn’t have been a challenging flight for the two pilots and two nurses aboard. The temperature was 69 degrees; the sky was clear. The 60-mile journey normally takes a half hour, at most.

But once airborne, the plane ran into trouble. At the White Sands Missile Range that night, US military personnel were conducting a GPS jamming exercise that left the King Air pilots—and anyone else within hundreds of miles—unable to use modern navigation systems. Forced to revert to older technology, ones that they rarely if ever use, the medevac pilots got disoriented and crashed into the side of a mountain. There were no survivors.

The accident marked the first time that GPS jamming had contributed to the crash of a civilian plane in the United States. But it was just one of a string of recent disruptions across the world. The skies are more contested than ever, whether it’s civilian drones wandering out of the approved zone or US agencies getting their signals crossed, as happened earlier this year when New Mexico and Texas scared the public by temporarily closing their airspace. (It turned out that US Customs and Border Patrol were using anti-drone lasers in that area.) The GPS jamming exercise that led to this latest crash is not a singular event. In the past year, the US military appeared to have sent out notices for at least 10 such exercises. “As drone warfare and electronic warfare expand, airlines are increasingly encountering navigation disruptions hundreds of miles beyond the actual conflict zone,” says Eliran Almog, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Cyviation.

It's worth taking a closer look at what happened last May. While the Ruidoso crash was the first fatal accident in the US known to be linked to electronic warfare, there’s no reason to think it will be the last.

Even absent GPS jamming, medevac is one of the most dangerous categories of civil aviation. (Kreindler, a law firm specializing in air crash litigation, says that medevac flights have an accident rate more similar to combat flying than to civil aviation.) Flights are often organized on short notice, and they fly into airstrips that might be unfamiliar to the flight crew, and because human lives are at stake, there is an incentive to fly when weather conditions are marginal.

Some of those factors were at play on the night of May 13. At 11 pm, the crew was notified that they had to fly to Ruidoso to pick up a patient and bring them to Albuquerque. The pilots were captain Keelan Clark, aged 30, and first officer Ali Kawsara, aged 23. Clark had gotten his commercial pilot’s license just a year and a half before; he’d been promoted from first officer to captain the previous month. Kawsara had just two months on the job. He’d only worked cargo jobs before this one.

Both men had demonstrated proficiency flying in low-visibility conditions using what’s called instrument flight rules, or IFR. There are two basic ways to navigate in bad weather. Modern cockpits are equipped with GPS-enabled equipment that shows where the plane is on a computer screen and portrays a magenta-colored line that shows pilots where they need to go. This is called RNAV flying; an “RNAV approach” brings planes all the way to the threshold of a runway for landing in low-visibility conditions.

This method of flying is much easier than the previous iteration. Before GPS became widely available in the 2000s, airliners navigated using a combination of magnetic compasses, ground-based radio beacons, and inertial systems derived from old-fashioned gyroscopes. Flying by radio beacons requires pilots to form a 3D mental map of their location relative to the beacons. They have to practice until they become so efficient that they can stay calm under pressure, lest they panic, lose their situational awareness, and spiral out of control. “Just ask Kennedy,” says Kenneth Krentsa, a retired airline pilot, referring to JFK Jr.’s 1999 nighttime crash.

Clark and Kawsara took off at eight minutes to midnight and initially headed due west, toward Ruidoso. The weather was clear, but because the night was nearly moonless and the area is rural, the only visual references available were the lights of scattered settlements. “It’s a black hole out there,” says Juan Browne, an airline pilot who hosts a crash-investigation podcast.

Unable to orient themselves without visual cues, the pilots called up Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center—Albuquerque Center, for short—and requested permission to fly instruments-only to Ruidoso. The request was approved.

Under normal circumstances, the flight that followed would have been uneventful. The pilots would have followed the magenta line, and the GPS navigation equipment would have lined them up for a smooth landing.

But 100 miles to the west, an Air Force Unit called the 746th Test Squadron of the 704th Test Group was holding its annual NAVFEST event at the White Sands Missile Range. The event draws together electronic warfare units from across the armed services for two weeks of exercises, in which units test different technologies for disrupting GPS and dealing with adversaries’ disruption.

The event is held at White Sands because it’s among the most remote and sparsely settled areas of the continental United States. (Not coincidentally, the first atomic bomb was detonated there.) But in the run-up to NAVFEST, the Federal Aviation Administration warned aircraft operators that GPS could be affected up to 400 miles away between May 12 and May 18.

At midnight on May 14, eight minutes after Clark and Kawsara took off from Roswell, they told Albuquerque Center that they’d lost their GPS. Unable to navigate on their own, they asked that the controller give them a heading—a magnetic direction to fly in. The controller gave them a heading to fly west, and then, a minute later, to turn north.

The pilots said that they wanted to fly an RNAV approach to Ruidoso. This being ruled out while GPS is jammed, the King Air pilots changed their request and asked to use an alternate form of landing system called Instrument Landing System, or ILS, that doesn’t require GPS reception. At 12:05 am, the controller assured the King Air that they would provide them with vectors to guide them “in a couple of minutes.” In the meantime, they kept flying north.

In retrospect, tragedy might have been avoided if Albuquerque air traffic control had been able to pay closer attention to the young pilots in the King Air. But tonight they were busy. Three other aircraft also reported that they’d lost their GPS and needed help. One was struggling to get a bearing on a radio beacon.

While ATC helped other planes, the King Air continued north. By 12:08 am, they had overshot the landing pattern by 10 miles.

At this point the pilots had three options. They could stick to the current plan and wait for the busy controller to give them the next vector toward the landing. Or, now that GPS was working again, they could ask to switch to the RNAV approach and fly it themselves. Or they could ditch the instrument approach altogether and fly what’s called a visual approach. You see a runway, and you fly to it.

As the King Air flew north, they were high enough to see the lights of Ruidoso's airport 31 miles to the southwest. To the pilots in the cockpit of the King Air, a visual approach must have seemed a tantalizing prospect. Why hang around waiting for ATC to give them vectors, why go through the mental acrobatics of trying to figure out where they were relative to the ILS beacon? All they had to do was fly toward the lights that they could clearly see through their windshield.

The King Air called Albuquerque Center and asked to “go visual.” The request was granted.

As they turned and descended toward Ruidoso’s lights, what the pilots couldn’t see was the 10,000-foot-high mass of the Capitan Mountains lying across their path. As they drew closer, the dark mass of rock appeared to rise up, swiping away the lights of the valley. This could have created "confusion and a loss of situational awareness,” Browne says. “When those lights go out, man, you know you are in big trouble.”

The pilots slowed their descent, even climbing a little, but it wasn’t enough. They kept flying straight toward the mountain. “When you are in that state of mind, you climb as high as you can,” Krentsa says. “And you circle. You stay in one place until you figure out where you are. You don't just keep pressing forward, blindly.”

But that’s what the King Air pilots did. They flew straight into the rising slope and hit it at full speed. All four occupants died instantly.

The nature of warfare is changing profoundly, and quickly, as drones become cheaper, more numerous, and more deadly. Hard to spot, and hard to shoot down, they provide an effective way for smaller, less resourced nations to level the playing field against more powerful adversaries. Ukraine, nearly overwhelmed by Russia’s conventional warfare might at the beginning of 2022, has rapidly developed its drone force to gain what appears to be an upper hand in the conflict. And while the US achieved total air superiority over Iran after attacking the country this February, it has found itself helpless to stop Iran from using drones and missiles to effectively shut down traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

To fight back, defenders can try to exploit a drone’s navigation. A cheap and simple way for drones to reach their targets is by GPS, which uses radio signals received from a constellation of satellites to calculate a position. When those signals are blocked, an enemy’s drones can be rendered blind. But the enemy, too, can take countermeasures. Drone and anti-drone technologies find themselves in an endless cat-and-mouse battle, each continuously trying to outdo the other. Exercises like NAVFEST offer a way for the US military to stay on top of the game.

Civilian GPS has become collateral damage, and air travel most of all. Since 2023, planes flying over large swaths of the Middle East, the Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea regions have endured waves of GPS jamming. Airlines have learned to adapt, but a price is still being paid. GPS was a major boost for airline safety, and while removing it may not instantly cause planes to fall from the sky, it removes a layer of protection from passengers and crew. Add in other stressors—a dark night, an inexperienced crew, a lack of proficiency in the backup technology—and the sum total is enough to yield disaster.

“There is no question that increased levels of GPS jamming and spoofing around the world pose a safety risk for commercial aviation. When alarms go off routinely in the cockpit, and when pilots learn to disregard key readings from their instruments because the readings can't be trusted, we're a long way from normal operation,” says Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin who has been a leading researcher into GPS disruption. “Air travel is still very safe, but it may be stuck for the next five years or more in a mild-and-increasing risk situation as we confront ever more GPS interference within the very-slow-to-adapt aviation industry.”

For a few years, US aviation was spared the disruptions of anti-drone electronic warfare. Then it started to happen here, too. In March 2025, airliners flying into Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC, received spurious alarms from a collision-avoidance system, and several had to abort their landings. It later turned out that the Secret Service was testing electronic warfare equipment at the vice president’s residence. This year, two separate incidents in West Texas involving US Army and CBP drone operations led to airspace closures and the disruption of commercial flights.

The aviation industry has been slow to grapple with the proliferation of counter-drone measures and their potential effects on flight safety. Airlines and other commercial operators are still heavily reliant on GPS for navigation, and other crucial technologies, like collision avoidance, are also vulnerable. “The harder problem with drones isn't defeating them. It's doing it without creating a system that negatively impacts civil aviation,” says Kris Brost, general manager of Robin Radar Systems, a drone defense company. “Counter-drone technology has to be surgical, not a sledgehammer, because the airspace we're trying to protect is the same airspace the economy runs on.”

Living in a world with drones of both the friendly and unfriendly variety is going to take a lot of adjusting. Historically, major changes in aviation take place only after crashes that kill a large number of people. But a sufficiently motivating catastrophe may not be far off.

On July 7, a 737 freighter, operated by a tiny Pakistani cargo airline called K2 Airways, took off in the late afternoon from Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates and flew east toward Karachi with a five-person crew. Its route took it just south of the Strait of Hormuz, an area that had been experiencing intense GPS jamming due to the US-Iran conflict. Later, after nightfall, the flight crew called Karachi air traffic control and reported a “navigational system issue,” according to the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority. In the three minutes that followed, the plane dove 5,000 feet, climbed 6,000 feet, and then plunged 36,000 feet into the ocean in a near-vertical dive, killing everyone aboard. It’s too early to know what caused the crash. But it won’t be any surprise if the electronic warfare made another pilot fly into darkness.

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